After a string of crew shortages, mechanical and website challenges impacting service this summer, BC Ferries has its fingers crossed for smooth sailing this long weekend.
CEO Nicolas Jimenez told Global News that most customers have heeded advice to make a reservation on busy sailing sailing routes, and while there is room for drive-ups, there will be lines.
“We are ready,” he said Thursday.
“We’ve got all of our crews ready to go, we’ve got standby licensed officers ready to go, we’ve introduced changes to our website to make it more resilient in the unexpected event there’s a surge in demand.”
According to the CEO, BC Ferries’ data centre has been beefed up with extra storage and service capacity to handle increased volume. The company has also added a waiting room feature, so customers can be queued in an orderly fashion to access the website.
The website will be proactively monitored all weekend, Jimenez added, and “tuned for performance.”
All of BC Ferries’ vessels — including the embattled Coastal Celebration — will be in the water this weekend.
“We’ve got misting stations and hydration stations and activities for kids at our bigger terminals. We’ve got parking management and traffic control in place at the bigger terminals to make sure we can handle the volume,” said Jimenez.
“So we’ve done as much as we can to prep and now we just have to essentially wait for the traffic to arrive and bring everybody on board safely.”
Frustration has mounted with BC Ferries for many months, with crew shortages and mechanical challenges leading to cancelled sailings.
On the May long weekend, an outage at BC Ferries’ data centre further caused its website and app to crash. The July long weekend presented challenges as well, as issues with the Coastal Celebration required it to reassign more than 6,600 bookings and run eight fewer sailing sailings on a major route for six days.
Sailings were cancelled again when the Coastal Celebration returned to the water, but further mechanical issues were identified. That same month, BC Ferries’ website showed an erroneous nine-sailing wait time and 12-hour delay, causing public confusion.
Last month, BC Ferries Services Board chair Joy MacPhail said, “No one at BC Ferries thinks this is acceptable.” Earlier this week, Jimenez acknowledged “frustrations” this summer, but said longstanding resource challenges won’t be fixed overnight.
In a Thursday statement, BC Ferries’ executive director of public affairs Deborah Marshall said reporters will receive two daily media briefings throughout the BC Day long weekend.
BC Ferries receives hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies annually, but is a publicly-owned company. In the past year, it said it has hired more than 1,200 people to address crew shortages.
The first quarter of 2023 has been the busiest in its history, it has noted, with more than 5.8 million passengers and 2.5 million vehicles over a three-month period.
Meanwhile, the B.C. Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure is advising motorists to expect delays on the Coquihalla Highway this weekend, with construction zone speeds of 70 kilometres per hour at the Bottletop, Juliet and Jessica bridges.
Delays are also expected on Highway 1 between Hope and Spences Bridge for piloted single-lane alternative traffic and a temporary traffic light at a rail crossing.
For updates on road conditions and delays, the public can check the DriveBC website.